present day. Procured by Grosseteste some time before 1254, it passes to Oxford, and remains there till the Grey Friar's Convent is dissolved by Henry VIII. Then there is a gap of a generation at most. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, acquires it (believing it, absurdly enough, to have belonged to Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century), and bequeaths it to his college of Corpus Christi in 1574.

Latin MSS.

We turn to the Latin division, and here the difficulty of selecting lines of procedure is very great. A paragraph of historical preface, at any rate, must be attempted.

At the period of the Barbarian invasions—the fifth century—the learned countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have lately begun to realize—namely, that in the case of France there was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes, the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication of the first printed Bible.

This absurdly condensed review of ten centuries has, I believe, some truth in it, in spite of the fact that every clause needs qualification. We shall have to go over the same ground again a little more slowly. At present we will devote a little time to the beginnings of our period.

A few relics of the days before the Barbarian invasion have reached us. I am not thinking of the library of rolls found at Herculaneum in the eighteenth century, the unrolling and decipherment of which still goes on slowly at Naples, nor of the many precious fragments of rolls and books which have come in our own generation from Egypt, but rather of those which have been preserved above ground in libraries. Such are the Virgils of the Vatican, of St. Gall, and of Florence.

Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.

They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less complete. The surnames they go by are Sangallensis, Augusteus, Vaticanus, Romanus, Mediceus.

Sangallensis and Augusteus are practically the only pieces of books we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the Roman inscriptions. Sangallensis consists of a few leaves which were found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in that abbey's library. Of Augusteus there are four leaves at Rome (Vaticanus latinus 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.

Vaticanus (lat. 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the fourth century.

Romanus (Vat. lat. 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy too, but not nearly so good in style.

Mediceus, written before a.d. 494, is at Florence (a single leaf of it is bound up with Vaticanus). It was formerly in the abbey library of Bobbio.

These three books are written in "rustic capitals."

A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome. There was a time, early in the nineteenth century, when Angelo Mai, afterwards Cardinal, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, was constantly launching fresh surprises upon scholars, the results of his work in what was then an almost untouched field. Large fragments of Cicero's Republic, of lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St. Columban (d. 615). The list of the early and valuable MSS. which can be traced to it would take up a large share of my available space; but among the precious things it owned was a number of quite ancient volumes, the Cicero and Fronto and others—books sumptuously written in uncial letters in the fourth century, which, sad to say, the Bobbio monks themselves broke up, washed out the earlier writing, and covered the pages with texts more immediately useful to them. Whence did they come? An answer to that question has been offered recently which finds favour among experts. They are the relics, it is said, of the library formed by Cassiodorus at his monastery of Vivarium or Squillace, in South Italy. Cassiodorus is a great figure in the history of his own time, and in his influence upon the general course of learning. He was private secretary to Theodoric King of the Goths; in his old age he retired from public to monastic life, and his last years were devoted to equipping the monks he had gathered about him for study—first and foremost the study of the Scriptures, but also, as leading up to that, the study of languages, of history and geography, and, as conducing to the general welfare, of medicine, botany, and other useful arts. It had been a cherished project of his to found an academy at Rome where all such learning might be fostered, but that plan failed, and Cassiodorus took into his retreat at Vivarium all the store of books he had accumulated, and wrote a little manual to guide his monks to the right use of them. His Institutes (as the book is called) do not give a set catalogue of his library, but there are many and striking coincidences between the manual and the literary works which can be traced to Bobbio. A specimen may be given: he recommends a writer on gardening called Gargilius Martialis. Hardly anyone else mentions this person, and his work had disappeared until Mai found pieces of it in a palimpsest at Naples which had come from Bobbio. We owe much to Cassiodorus in any case, for it was he who commended secular learning to monks, and the fact that monks were the great preservers of ancient literature cannot be dissociated from his influence. I shall be glad if the theory I have stated (it is that of the late Dr. Rudolf Beer) proves sound; to have some of the very volumes which Cassiodorus